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Tom Özden-Schilling, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science After the War in 

the Woods. Duke University Press, 2023. 320 p. IBSN 9781478027669.  

 

Keywords: rural, Canada, settler-colonialism, indigenous, expertise, place, environmental 

science 

 

In The Ends of Research, Tom Özden-Schilling takes us through a nuanced and detailed account 

of both Euro-Canadian and First Nation researchers in the ‘ambiguous afterlives’ of a resource 

conflict in British Columbia, and how through their varied research projects they produce 

potent relationships to place whilst enduring the professional precarity brought on by the 

withdrawal of the state. He details the complex hopes and difficulties faced by researchers, and 

the subtle politics of the fine-grained environmental science they practice, as well as the 

potentials and potencies of the scientific artefacts they produce.  

 

Özden-Schilling begins with the question of who ‘won’ the War in the Woods, using the futility 

of this question to begin to unpack the ambiguous legacies and place of those involved in it. 

This ‘war’ was a period of intense protest by First Nations groups (namely, Gitxsan and 

Wet’suwuet’en) and citizen activists around the clearcutting of forest in British Columbia in 

the 80s and 90s. This, too, is a conflict that is far from over, with protests again flaring up in 

2021, and where the underlying injustices remain unresolved. While the book does not focus 

on the activists themselves (reflected on later, p. 229), the period of activism and protest ran 

parallel with a proliferation of research projects that brought researchers from other parts of 

the country to the region, as well as the funding of indigenous mapping projects, as part of an 

effort from the state to better ‘know’ the ecological terrain to ‘govern better.’ The Ends of 

Research is focused on these researchers, and how they understood their modes of knowledge 

production in relation to these wider struggles, and how they find their place and articulate 

claims after being left in the lurch by the withdrawal of the state.  

 



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Thematically, Özden-Schilling focuses on how the politics of expertise intersects and relates 

with issues of indigeneity and coloniality, and the various lives and effects different techno-

scientific artifacts and techniques have. He details both the particularities and convergences of 

Euro-Canadian and First Nations researchers, and the different ways these professional and 

social communities of researchers work to maintain viable connections to place and profession. 

This is skilfully done, balancing an account of the different interests informing both settler and 

indigenous science while maintaining interior heterogeneity to each group, giving an 

interwoven narrative of the politics and practice environmental science in northwest British 

Columbia.  

 

In the first chapter, Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State, we consider the role of 

Euro-Canadian researchers that moved into the region. Here, Özden-Schilling discusses ‘rural 

researchers’ and their fraught relation with the state: one the one hand, they are nostalgic for 

the technocracy that brought them security and authority, but this inability to secure solid 

financing has also led them to develop other ways to guarantee a place in this environment they 

have come to feel obligated toward. We are given a detailed account of how these researchers 

negotiate this position, and how they interlace their scientific expertise with their position as 

residents in the area, producing fine-grained and detailed ecological knowledge, as well as how 

through this they write themselves into the future of the area. Özden-Schilling’s use of ‘rural 

researchers’ neatly captures this fraught position, wherein they balance commitments to place 

with professional ambitions – a move that works to complicate more morally firm portrayals 

of technocratic actors.  

 

In the second chapter, Calling: The Return of Gitxan Research, we turn to First Nations counter-

mapping projects and the attempts to leverage scientific instruments and methods to develop 

alternative infrastructures of self-governance. They, like their white counterparts, take seriously 

the interest of the state vis-à-vis developing detailed ecological knowledge of the area, and 

focus on producing exquisitely detailed research to better campaign for their desired ends of 

greater autonomy. This emphasis on the need for technical expertise in order to develop 

evidence toward more autonomy leads First Nations groups to be invested in the making of 

experts – a process where the personal tolls can be extremely trying (loneliness, distance, 

constant travel), and where the rewards of such efforts are continually deferred to the future. 

Özden-Schilling overviews these ‘paths to professionalization’ through two interlocutors, 



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giving a sense of the distinct modes indigenous researchers have understood and wielded their 

responsibilities to collectives alongside their scientific authority (p. 103).   

 

In Chapter Three, Inheritance: Replacement and Leave-Taking in a Research Forest, the issue 

of the reproduction of these research projects and the labour of ecology (and adjacent sciences) 

is considered. This is a particularly stimulating chapter, attentive to how this mode of research 

(long-term engagement, detailed recording, maintaining plots, etc.) offers a space to ponder 

one’s own attachment to place, addressing with the potentials for reconciliation (p. 129) 

alongside the dangers of one’s research fortifying state agendas that would undercut indigenous 

claims. This comfort in addressing but not resolving tensions is a strength of the work and the 

utility of the category of ‘rural researchers’ as an ambiguous position between abstract science 

and committed attachments to place, where through the affective investment one makes 

gradually through mundane, repetitive, and collaborative work in the forests one cultivates 

diffuse, tacit knowledge and appreciation of the environment and professional community. 

Focusing on the succession of one scientist to his younger apprentice, Özden-Schilling brings 

these precise issues that define the ever-fraught ‘rural researcher’ to the fore.  

 

Chapter Four, Consignment: Trails, Transects, and Territory Without Guarantees focuses on 

research funded by an oil company to assess their pipeline proposal that includes both 

indigenous and white researchers. This is a charged and uncertain project, but the author 

explains how despite the controversy around taking the money from an oil company, this is 

understood as a strategic decision to allow the research to survive. This is justified through the 

deferral of the promises of this research and a focus on “a subtler politics of collecting, refining, 

and repurposing data drawn from decades’ worth of chance encounters in the field: 

depoliticized in the instant, perhaps, but latent in their power, and consigned for confrontations 

to come” (p.176). Özden-Schilling also advances a wider argument around the utility of these 

technoscientific artefacts produced through field mapping and how these have purchase for 

indigenous groups in producing knowledge legible management institutions, through which 

they can exert influence, while also understanding how this focus on a particular form of 

knowledge has led to the professionalization of indigenous knowledge and its codification into 

abstracting, technical documents.  

 

Lastly, in the fifth chapter, Resilience: Systems and Survival After Forestry’s Ends, takes us to 

consider the contestations of collaborative research, and how in these debates different ideals 



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and hopes for the future are made manifest. We are given an account of how resilience theory 

has spread to British Columbia, with its focus on simplified knowledge and collaborative 

projects that sideline rather than enhance different expertise, particularly regarding indigenous 

researchers. Özden-Schilling explains how resilience theory’s focus on technocratic 

simplification, directed toward centralised authorities rather than local bodies, endangers the 

‘federalised’ organisation of expertise that currently persists (p. 201), how ‘rural researchers’ 

are pressured to adapt or perish, and indigenous researchers increasingly find their work 

unvalued in this new, neoliberal paradigm. This, in the context of the book, feels like a graver 

threat than others, as it undermines the fundamental meanings of their research even more 

thoroughly than alternative donors might. Overall, this last chapter highlights the heightened 

stakes and difficulties of maintaining a coherent research community, the increasing doubt 

around the reproduction of this community, ending on a dubiously hopeful note that this ‘mode 

of living’ may yet persist even if the promise of a more radically open future fades slightly 

more.  

 

The Ends of Research is a stimulating ethnography that productively lingers on the ambiguities 

of environmental research, unveiling how ‘rural researchers’ and indigenous researchers alike 

make and contest place through detailed research despite increasing disregard by the state in 

British Columbia. It should be of great interest to anthropologists of science, the environment, 

and governance generally, science and technology studies scholars, and those interested in 

issues of ‘post’-colonialism and indigeneity.  

 

Gabriel Urlich Lennon is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. 

He researches the socio-ecological contestations around agriculture and conservation in 

Aotearoa (New Zealand), and is broadly interested in ecological, political, and more-than-

human anthropology.  

 

 

 

© 2024 Gabriel Urlich Lennon 

 


